Movies: Past, present and future

'Anchorman 2' is off the air

April 29, 2010 | 4:55pm

Thursday's bit of Hollywood news sponsored by Twitter: The "Anchorman 2" sequel that a few stars from the original had been talking about on the junket circuit is a no-go.

Adam McKay, director and co-writer on the 2004 Will Ferrell comedy hit (and his collaborator on the upcoming "The Other Guys"), says that filmmakers and the studio couldn't see eye to eye on a budget. "So bummed. Paramount basically passed on Anchorman 2. Even after we cut our budget down. We tried," he tweeted earlier Thursday afternoon, followed by, a short time later, "To all who asked: no we can't do Anchorman 2 at another studio. Paramount owns it."

The Ron Burgundy character from the original is pretty indelible, though hard to imagine what a sequel would have looked like, especially since that kind of '70s-skewering has been out of fashion for a while now (put out to pasture in part by Ferrell's own "Semi-Pro" a couple of years ago).

Of course, the real culprit is not creative but financial: It's almost impossible to do comedy sequels because the only ones we all want to see are the big hits, and the big hits usually drive everyone's price up, making a new movie as cost-ineffective as, well, "Anchorman 2" ("Hangover" is the rare exception). No matter. McKay and Ferrell will come up with a new one. We hope.

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I thought Adam McKay said that he'd talked to Ferrell, Christina Applegate, and Steve Carell and asked them to lower their fees so that financing would not be an issue. Perhaps that is not all that was at issue.